Interview With Filmmaking Duo Matt Angel And Suzanne Coote For ‘The Wrath Of Becky’

Back in 2020 a little indie film called Becky swept through the horror genre and took it by storm. Starring Lulu Wilson and Kevin James, Becky was all anyone talked about, urging horror fans and anyone who would listen to check out this gem of a film. Becky was an unlikely hero; a teenage girl slicing and dicing her way through a bunch of rogue convicts who turned her quiet vacation with her father on its head. With a strong female character leading the way through practical effects and vicious kills, Becky earned its spot as top horror film of the year.

Now horror fans are in for a real treat – a sequel that no one saw coming but is everything we needed. Picking up two years after Becky survived the attack on her family, The Wrath of Becky follows our unlikely hero as she sets out on a mission to save her dog, Diego, from a group of “Nobel Men,” leaving blood and carnage in her wake.

To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with husband-and-wife filmmaking duo, Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, via Zoom about penning and directing the much-anticipated sequel, preparing for the shoot, what’s up next, and more!

**Spoiler Alert! This interview contains spoilers for The Wrath of Becky**

PopHorror: I loved The Wrath of Becky. It was so much fun. It had my jaw on the floor the whole time. Also, thank you for not killing the dog.

Suzanne Coote: Yes, anytime, anytime. That will never happen in one of our movies.

Matt Angel: Yeah, if she’s involved it will never happen.

Suzanne Coote: Or you.

Matt Angel: I thought about it.

Suzanne Coote: No. I was like, “We’re over if you kill it. I will never talk to you again.”

PopHorror: I was like, “If they kill that fucking dog, I will be so pissed.”

Suzanne Coote: Never. Never.

Matt Angel: We know better.

Suzanne Coote: I couldn’t even shoot that scene. It just doesn’t exist in my world.

PopHorror: Good. I like to hear that. How did you both become involved with the project and how did you come up with the story?

Matt Angel: We had known the BoulderLight team for years, and we had been trying to find something to work on with them. They approached us at the end of 2021, and they said, “You guys wouldn’t be interested in doing a sequel to Becky, the 2020 film with Kevin James and Lulu Wilson?” And we talked about it. We had been trying to find something to do with them,and we also knew Lulu Wilson. We were actually neighbors with her when she was shooting the first Becky, so we knew the Wilson family, and we love them, and we loved JD (Lifshitz) and Raphael (Margules), and Tracy (Rosenblum). It was really I think, at that point, about the team involved, and how much fun we thought the first film was. So we were like, “Yeah that would be fun.” JD says, “Cool. We need a script in three weeks, and then we need to shoot it right after that.” We were like, “Oh, okay.” We’d just found out she was pregnant – we’re married – and she was like, “I’m not doing that.”

Suzanne Coote: I was in my first trimester, and I was like, “Okay.”

Matt Angel: It was about to be the holidays and I was like, “I think I want to try it.” And she was like, “You’re crazy. You’re going to want to kill someone.” And I was like, “I think I can do it. I’m going to go for it.” So we did it. And the way that it started in terms of how we came up with the story was a couple things: you watch the film and you have ideas that come to you. I knew that we wanted her to have been on the run from foster homes. You naturally go, okay as writers, put yourself in the character’s shows. What would Becky have done? She would have been put in the foster care system and she would have been like, “Fuck that. I’m not going to do that.” Then you go, okay, what’s the kind of person she’d end up with? What does that look like? So you start to explore those things, and you go, okay, from a character perspective, we’re laying the groundwork, which is very important. It’s everything, especially if you want to invite a new audience into the film. You need to introduce a new version of a familiar character. That’s what all great sequels do. We were watching sequels every day just to kind of like pick them apart and go, “What makes this the great sequel that it is?” JD at BoulderLight said, “I think it would be fun to do something with like incels.” That put us on the message boards, not as users but as readers.

Suzanne Coote: As observers.

Matt Angel: As observers. And it didn’t take long for us to be like, “Yeah, those are bad guys.” It’s a nice natural progression of a modern day neo-Nazi that doesn’t need to have a swastika tattoo to show on their head. They’re amongst us every time we go to the grocery store. They’re everywhere and they look like us, and they’re in the headlines everyday. That’s where we quickly settled on that’s the natural progression of villains.

Suzanne Coote: I went to the grocery store a couple days ago, and a guy was wearing Trump’s mug shot on his shirt.

Matt Angel: Sounds great. I love this guy.

Suzanne Coote: I couldn’t even look at him but it was not great. It was like “wrongly accused,” like badass. Like he’s a hero. He was like, “I can’t wait to get out of this state!” And I was like, “Go! Go! Get out!”

Matt Angel: It’s ripped from the headlines, and we knew that we could lean into comedy by creating a satirical world of something that is far too dark to execute realistically in the world of Becky.

PopHorror: It’s not very often that a sequel is just as good as, or even surpasses, the original. This one was just fantastic, and the buzz online is so good. People are excited for this. 

Suzanne Coote: Yay, thank you!

Matt Angel: That makes us very happy to hear.

PopHorror: The kills in this film are just incredible. Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the film, no matter what?

Suzanne Coote: Yes, the way – I don’t want to give any spoilers – but there’s a tractor. But I wasn’t going to say that. You were more adamant about the tractor. I was adamant about everything. We’re kind of unrelenting, which our first AD would say that we took 10 years off his life. But he loves us, I think. The end with Seann William Scott.

Matt Angel: Oh yeah!

Suzanne Coote: His death had to be exactly how it was. There were beats. You’re going for the laugh. Not a laugh at the last one but where you’re like, “What?!”

Matt Angel: There are certain expectations, and the tractor was another one. That literally… We’re out of time, we’re not coming back to this location, and we were like, “Yes we are.” This has to happen.

Suzanne Coote: She has to come out on the tractor.

Matt Angel: There has to be the tractor moment, and I’m really glad that we stuck to our guns there, and that the producers let us stick to our guns. We say all the time since this movie, they taught us how invaluable the producers are, because yeah, there’s always this on set because you’re like, “We need it!” And they’re like, “We don’t have time. We can’t afford it.” Then somehow though, at the end of the day, I think we almost won all of our battles because they came at it from a very trusting place when it came to what Suzanne and I would fight for. The tractor was a big one where they made it work so we could come back to that location and shoot for another few hours there to get that moment. And I’m glad we did because the audience really responded to that.

Suzanne Coote: They loved it.

PopHorror: Matt, in addition to co-writing and co-directing, you also starred in the film. Was that always the plan?

Matt Angel: No. I’m an actor. I was an actor first. I love acting, I’m still acting. But this was always like, we’re writing and directing and the original script kept getting cut down, cut down like, “You gotta lose this character. Too many Noble Men. We gotta lose this character.”

Suzanne Coote: For budget.

Matt Angel: For budget, yeah. Every time we have another character on screen it’s more money. The last character that said has to go is the character I play, Sean. Suzanne and I were adamant that that character not get cut because in terms of the story, we needed that character within the cell to kind of create conflict so that they’re all kind of turning against each other. If you don’t have that it feels very two dimensional. You have Becky versus them, but there’s so much more drama when there’s drama within their cell. And that was Sean’s role so we were like, “We cannot cut that character.” Really what it came down to was we needed to save money on an actor and I was like, “I’ll do it. I’ll do it and I’ll play the role. I’ll jump in when I gotta jump in. There’s two of us.” Not like I couldn’t have done it if there was only one of us, but it was a no-brainer because she can sit at the monitor. I don’t have to sit there and watch playback, because on a film like this, you don’t have time. I can’t wait to Ben Affleck one day and have time to go back to the monitor and watch playback all the time but you don’t have that on an 18 day shoot with this budget and a minor in the lead role, and a dog, and stunts, and guns, and practical effects. You have to move. So we thought about it and how to save the character. I play the character and that’s how it happened.

PopHorror: I think it would have been a vastly different film without that character. 

Suzanne Coote: Totally.

PopHorror: The conversations, the conflict, would have been different. 

Suzanne Coote: That’s one of those fights that we were like, “Nope! Gotta figure it out. Gotta figure it out.” Because you can have a movie like Becky, that’s basically a gorefest, and it could still succeed to some degree without a great story or great characters just because it’s shock and awe, shock and awe. But what makes anything better is that the characters are – especially when it came to the Noble Men – it’s imperative to us that each Noble Man was different. They’re specific, not just a bunch of bad guys. Not like your cookie cutter central casting bad dude. They all had to be very different and very specific.

Matt Angel: You could argue that some of them are cookie cutter specific

Suzanne Coote: But different.

Matt Angel: All five of them are different versions of that.

Suzanne Coote: That’s what I mean. Not just a bunch of bad guys. They’re different. Courtney Gaines is different from Matt in a lot of different ways.

PopHorror: I like that. I like that the characters were different. Like Seann William Scott’s character, I didn’t expect him to be that way. When he said, “You’re going to find her, and give her her fucking dog back.” That’s not what I expected. I expected him to be like, “We’re going to kill this dog.”

Suzanne Coote: Because he’s thinking about the plan he has for the next day. This little girl and her dumbass dog are nothing compared to what he has to execute. But meatheads with anger problems got in his way.

PopHorror: What is up next for you both?

Suzanne Coote Well, nothing right now because of the strike.

Matt Angel: We’re pens down right now. Pencils, pens, whatever you choose.

Suzanne Coote: Typing fingers.

PopHorror: I thought you said pants at first.

Matt Angel: That’s a different interview.

Suzanne Coote: Oh my god!

Matt Angel: That’s very funny.

Suzanne Coote Pants down!

Matt Angel: We are full blown not working right now, standing in solidarity with the Writers Guild in support of everything that we are fighting for there. So that’s important to say because we believe it. But that said, we hope that it resolves quickly – come on AMPTP – and when it does resolve, we have a lot of ideas for Becky 3 and some other things in the works. If the world is lucky enough to have a Becky 3, and we’re lucky enough to be involved, we have a lot of ideas and there are a lot of things we planted in the second one that were not by mistake and lead to what that story would be.

PopHorror: Good. That’s what I wanted to hear. Just one last question for you both. What is your favorite scary movie?

Matt Angel: Such a hard choice.

Suzanne Coote: Okay. I was just reminded, actually, of Insidious. I can’t answer favorite, but what I can answer is Insidious right now, because I was just reminded of one of the moments when you realize Patrick Wilson’s been possessed, and Rose Byrne takes a photo of him.

Matt Angel: That final moment.

Suzanne Coote: And that nun is behind him like “Fuck!” Oh god. Right now, I’m on an Insidious drip.

Matt Angel: Okay, I’m going to give three because I’m gonna. I’m going to do different time periods. No, four. Before I was born, The Shining. When I was a teenager, The Descent. 2010s, Sinister, because that movie just fucked me up. That is really messed up. And then I’m going to say one that hasn’t come out yet but I had the privilege to see at Overlook in New Orleans, Talk to Me.

Thank you so much to Matt and Suzanne for taking the time to speak with us. The Wrath of Becky is exclusively in theaters now!